NetBSD and my life (2005) | Hacker News Reader

NetBSD and my life (2005)

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153 pointsgnyeki51 comments

For me, it was Gentoo. I was a little bit lost after a bad time in the public school system, and not sure what to do with my life after that. I was fascinated by Linux, but never really got the hang of it. Used SuSE, which was fine, but I never really knew what I was doing. And then I get into Gentoo. Messed up some stage3 installs until it all started to click for me and I had the correct mental models for stuff and how it all fit together to form a complete system. That basically kickstarted my career as a Sysadmin, and I'm still a Gentoo user to this day (but only on the desktop, too much compiling for my laptop...). I feel very, very grateful to all the folks involved. Of course to all the people behind Linux, but Gentoo especially. In a way, it saved my live. Not sure where I would have landed w/o Linux.

I've also used Gentoo professionally on many occasions, of course for one-off servers that I treated like pets early in my career, but also in a more cattle-like role. Had a custom updater that copied a new stage4 into a "B-Slot" (btrfs subvolume) from a golden master system. That contraption drove about ~25 POS systems for a small retail chain.

NetBSD was my favourite playing around OS from the late 1990s to about 2010. Worked on any old crap I had lying around which was mostly thoroughly obsolete SPARC and x86 kit. Did the job. Never went wrong. Good documentation built in. Netbooted on anything.

No idea where it is now but this post has inspired me to have a look.

I was a fan of FreeBSD over NetBSD; far more driver compatibility in the 1990s. It was nice to play with. Way too hard to use for much (well, online) now, due to the shrinking number of software packages (eg browsers) these days. I still remember how good it used to feel installing NetBSD on (now long long dead) laptop in the early/mid-90s.

I would have gone for FreeBSD myself but alas it didn’t run on the SPARC stuff I lifted out of the company skip :)

I think the thing with the BSDs in general was the fact I didn’t always even need any extra software packages on them. The base install was that useful.

Yeah, NetBSD definitely had Sparc compatibility. I wonder how many OpenSolaris and NetBSD machines on old Sparc hardware are still on the internet (like ones that aren't doing it just to say they are).

The base install _was_ useful. Can still do stuff like write, and those sorts of old packages still work, but browsers.... not so much.

The BSDs were so clean. With the exception of Slackware, Linux distros at the time (late 90s/early 2000s) tended to be bloated with everything installed and enabled by default for "ease of use" reasons. I was an OpenBSD guy, and the way they made loading things so cleanly and straightforward in /etc/rc.conf was a delight.

NetBSD is the only Unix that IMO still fun to hack on.. no AI, just hack..

its also an incredibly large codebase compared to the other bsds

True, but a lot of that size comes from supporting an absurd number of architectures and platforms... That’s also part of what makes NetBSD fun to hack on, IMO.

I'm considering initiating a campaign to influence a community space that I'm a part of into running NetBSD on some low-risk infrastructure that we may adopt.

I have been wanting to do this for a while. I have used FreeBSD and OpenBSD in server or embedded environments, but never as a desktop. And I have zero experience with NetBSD or DragonflyBSD but want to play with those too.

I enjoyed the time I spent browsing the web and reading ebooks while running OpenBSD on a Thinkpad. The same goes for hosting a web page on a VPS I used to rent. I found that what people say about it is true: the documentation is great. To the extent that I needed to tinker I gained a fair amount of coherence about how things worked. This is sort of what I want the guys in my community to experience for themselves.

It's easy as balls these days to spin up a VM with the OS of your choice provided it's not terribly taxing (which NetBSD isn't). Go ahead and just try it, man! Take an evening or a weekend.

You could just throw a squirrel carcass in a cardboard box and install netbsd on it

Even little-endian squirrels.

Awesome!

Two things:

1) “We were” (sorry I had to do it).

2) Why NetBSD? Why not FreeBSD or Debian or heck even Ubuntu Server or RHEL/CentOS (forgot it was 2005)?

Glad you got the spend more time with the family!

As to why, Gary didn't say.. or even contribute again, so we could surmise it was a made-up name to make sure the company he worked for wasn't identified, but some of the replies to his mail went into more detail about why they did, you can find them here

https://mail-index.netbsd.org/netbsd-advocacy/2005/09/

freebsd = utility: performance, gnu software compatibility, drivers, closest thing to useful as a desktop (still not very), but almost x86 only

openbsd = security: internet exposed services

netbsd = portability: already ported / most easily portable to every cpu arch & platform including old and new obscure ones. If you want a big-endian os for whatever academic reason, it's netbsd on an old sun sparc or pi3. I had an HP Jornada that had a SH3 cpu and shipped with wince, the only alternative os on that was netbsd.

NetBSD runs beautifully (but not quickly) on a 32-bit Raspberry Pi Zero. I hosted a mail server on that platform for about 7 years. I absolutely love how spare the system is when you start it up. You don’t even get a fancy shell, just sh. Running top on a new system is hilarious. It’s like init, your shell, and something else.

Linux was not quite that spare, but pretty spare when I first started using it (1995). I liked watching the text crawl while the kernel brought itself, init, and a few daemons up; and having to type "startx" to even get into a graphical environment (and even that was just fvwm).

It was... cyberpunk. I can't think of any other way to describe the aesthetic, the feel, of early Linux. All these bits and bobs written by many hands yet somehow working together, none of them beholden to how some corporate overlord felt I should be using my computer. I became aware of the suck of proprietary software even in 1995.

NetBSD is a lot like this, still even today. I love working with/in/on it.

I used to have about 7 things running on my old laptop running vectorlinux. 600Mhz, 64 MB, 7GB.

The sloppotrons are getting confused about old hardware support in the Linux kernel, so the kernel maintainers are simply removing it. NetBSD's portability is at significantly lower risk of being compromised like this, not least because the project bans sloppotrons outright. We may yet see a resurgence of NetBSD as "the OS for your toaster".

Or gentoo. Gentoo was pretty good around then, great to hack around with.

> 1) “We were” (sorry I had to do it).

He might be from around London

> This also lead to more arguments with the wife (which leads to a decrease in other things... ;)

I love the subtlety of the dual-use closing-parenthesis here.

You might enjoy this one: https://xkcd.com/541

How could there even be an xkcd which is so applicable? Wow.

> NetBSD during peak hours, our httpd servers can deal with 35 requests per minute(internal and external).

even in 2005 this is abysmal. no reflection of netbsd tho - likely a terrible app.

> 12MB email attachments

It was a different time.

People forget easily, or simply were not around ;)

I once worked for a company where the marketing department sent huge powerpoints presentations to each other via Lotus Notes. All people in the same office sitting next to each other. The Lotus mail server had no real issues with it, but i told them to stop abusing email as a file server and use the shared drive for that purpose. Took some time for them to getting used to, but the shared drive was so much faster for their purpose they quickly adopted to this ‘new way’ of working :)

The way it's written is ambiguous as it could also just mean the peak demand rate, not a capacity peak. I was doing some benchmarks for something recently and noticed how tricky it is to capture all the nuance of a test in prose.

i've used FreeBSD, and sometimes NetBSD and OpenBSD after they were forked from the Jolitz's 386BSD release.

I think that all 3 of the BSD's have matured into GREAT server operating systems.

My work environment has for many years used FreeBSD as file servers, both with UFS / and most recently with ZFS. excellent performance!

of minor related interest, at the Santa Clara California restaurant 'Empress of India', both the original NetBSD development team and some of the Linux folks (Linus particularly, who lived a couple of blocks away), would dine at that same restaurant in the 1980's and early 1990's... ...The NetBSD folks would sometimes wear a shirt with a BSD daemon 'buttf' the Linux penguin from behind...

Linux has also matured into an impressive OS. I personally think that the principle *BSD/GNU/Linux crews all deserve to share in a Nobel peace prize for their impact on the world... Much more positive impact on the world than that gates-crap DOS/DimDoze.

A fairytale is a beautiful thing.

Cool stuff

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